Premier Golda Meir has warned the Arab states that the longer they refuse to make peace with Israel the less of their lost territories Israel will return to them. If the Arab leaders had turned to Israel for peace right after the Six-Day War they would have received much more than Israel is prepared to give them today. She added that in the future they will get even less. Mrs. Meir made these remarks in an address to the Kibbutz Hameuchad movement convention in Bet Yaacov.
The Premier said that many important world figures had offered to act as go-betweens to create contacts between the Arab states and Israel, but that “all of these attempts came to naught.” She said that President Anwar Sadat still lacks the courage to tell his people that Egypt cannot defeat Israel on the battlefield “and that it is therefore necessary to make peace with us.”
Referring to the issue of Arab labor in Israeli agricultural settlements, Mrs. Meir said, “rather than resign ourselves to the spread of Arab labor, I would return territories to stop it.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
